Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Freedom Is Obedience

Only through perfect obedience will you achieve freedom. Freedom from the terrible burden of free will, which means we are responsible for our choices and the consequences of those choices. Freedom from self-doubt, from the fear of failure. Freedom from loneliness, as you join others seeking the same nirvana. God promises eternal life, God is the superhero buddy that's always on your side, God's love will take away fear and pain and give you perfect happiness.

For K-Lo, it's a no-brainer. (Literally.) The only kind of freedom she wants is the freedom to give away her rights as an individual and take away the individual rights of others for their own good.
For authoritarians, just as goodness is obedience, freedom is obedience. If God gives us liberty we will never truly be free because our freedom depends on the indulgence of God. But K-Lo, bless her heart, never sees the contradiction in her words. If God gave us free will he wants us to have the right to make our own choices instead of being forced to obey him.

But in K-Lo's interpretation of her religion, our only purpose in life is to worship God by demonstrating absolute obedience to his will. Therefore anything that interferes with absolute obedience is abridging her freedom to be obeisant to her god. It is impossible to find common ground politically with such a person because they feel they are standing on consecrated ground and you are trying to drag them to hell.

It's not as good as Pillars of the Earth, but it's entertaining. I enjoy Follet's historical novels for their immersive qualities (I'm no historian, so I can't vouch for their accuracy), but World Without End definitely feels more soap opera-ish than Pillars. Maybe I'm just older, and more critical, or maybe Pillars was just as pulpy, but the plot turns in World are a bit more obvious in coming, and about halfway through I started feeling a bit stupid for enjoying it all so much.

She's so authoritarian she cannot conceive of another way to live, and does not truly respect any other way to live but her own extremely conservative version of Catholicism. Most of the time I find her annoying and idiotic, but there are times I pity her. She is a lonely, unhappy person... and determined to make everyone else the same way.

And yet, if she is like the very religious people I've met, she is certain she is happy because "god loves her." She thinks that empty feeling inside comes from not being good enough to feel all of god's love, which means not obedient

The Catholic Church tells its followers that the only route to happiness is through Christ. Follow him, obey him, live through him. Think of god at all times. Sex exists to create god's children, everything good in life is god's gift, everything bad in life comes from putting your own wants before god's wants. Catholics deal with this by ignoring what they don't like so they can stay in the community. Hypocrisy and turning a blind eye are inevitable although K-Lo is so mindless such manipulation a are unnecessary.

It seems that Julie doesn't want to pay for liberals' birth control so they can spend $100 on mascara that they saw in the liberal propaganda organ Cosmo

Julie Borowski is the Policy Analyst at FreedomWorks. She first joined FreedomWorks as an Economic Research and Policy Intern in Spring 2010. Upon graduating Magna Cum Laude from Frostburg State University, she returned to FreedomWorks.

Previously, she was selected to be a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow with the Institute for Humane Studies where she interned at the Center for Competitive Politics. Most recently, she was a government affairs associate at Americans for Tax Reform.

Due to her college economics classes, she developed a passion for the Austrian School of Economics. She served as Vice President and Treasurer of her Maryland Student Legislation delegation and remains active in Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty. She has volunteered for political candidates in Kentucky and in her home state of Maryland. Her writings on various topics have appeared in numerous blogs and newspapers.

Koch-fed veal, who hopes to make a career by repeating standard conservative mantras. She probably thinks she is being groomed for intellectual stardom because of her brains and looks.

It's wrong to pick on children but if she's smart enough to graduate Magna Cum Laude she's smart enough to realize that she's working for conservative propaganda organs.

I especially like the way she tells the world to start making libertarian art so libertarians will finally be cool.

If libertarian art were any good, the free market would reward it.

The same goes for all Koch dogma and conservative loss-leaders like Weekly Standard and National Review. They cannot succeed on their merits, so they have Wingnut Welfare. They believe they're bold, rugged individualists; they're shills and neofeudalists.

I love their dilemma. They are libertarians because they want to be cool. That is, they want to be free of authoritarian control. They rant about the same thing as social conservatives because they are reflexively anti-liberal but unlike conservatives they see no reason why they should publicly conform to tribal boundaries.

They think they are leaders because they flaunt tribal rules but making up a fictional political class to legitimize your tribal transgressions is hopelessly authoritarian. They want to make their own rules, follow their own moral code, create their own art, gain power and influence through their own political action but they can't.

The rules, morals, art (propaganda), power and influence on their side is controlled by the wealthy, for the wealthy's very own benefit. This is why the followers chose that side to begin with; it was the side of the rich and powerful and they hoped to benefit from their proximity to all that money, safety, acceptance, admiration.

But being a follower means that their art, politics, entertainment, and religion must be tailored to help the leaders, not the followers. They have broken free of the followers' rules but they will never be able to break away from their leaders' rules, unless they were to abjure their position in the group.

They don't understand--they never understood--that they don't make the rules, they just enforce them.

So Julie Borowski wants libertarians to hurry up and gain power over the dominant liberal culture by creating libertarian culture, which will somehow immediately become popular. More Dennis Millers and Judd Aaptows and Atlas Shrugged!

But "art" is the creation of a connection from the artist to the viewer. The artist attempts to express his own emotional/intellectual life through his work and the viewer interprets the work through his own emotional/intellectual prism. Art tells us who we were, who we are, who we can be. Propaganda tells us who or what we must be, for the benefit of the propagandist. And it will never be cool.

I've never understood why these "libertarians" end up shilling for conservatives. it seems like they are at the core conservatives, but they can't stand to be uncool, so they fall for the rebranding of conservative ideas as "libertarian". talk about being a brain-washed follower...

You could make that comment about libertarians, art and propaganda into its own post. (I assume you're reading Roy Edroso's stuff, too – he's been writing quite a bit again on conservatives trying to claim pop culture and all that.)

Libertarians have the mentality of feudal lords; they scream about the tyranny of the king, because he might interfere with their "freedom" to oppress the serfs.

Why isn't there a zombie movie about Jesus' death? According to the bible, graves opened up and the dead walked the earth. Then Jesus rose from the dead too, but with his brains intact evidently. It could be like The Expendables, with apostles instead of commandos.

Batacchio, I hadn't read his last two posts yet when I wrote this but I was thinking on the same wavelength because I had just read and almost wrote about Ashley McGuire's post as well. Whenever women write about the good old days of pre-feminism they always imagine themselves with most of the advantages and few of the disadvantages. She seems to think men treated women with more respect in the old days, instead of taking advantage of their lack of legal and economic power.

Nothing will give them the certainty that they want; Maggie Gallagher fights gay marriage because she wants to know that if she gets knocked up the man will be forced to marry and stay with her. She ignores the fact that a man could just walk away in the old days as well. Respect was only given to women who were considered equals and superiors, and often not even then. How many men who acted respectfully to their wives in public behaved differently in private? She also has no idea how condescending men used to be to all women, including intelligent women. You haven't lived until you've had to sit and listen to men define words for you during conversations.

Libertarians have the mentality of feudal lords; they scream about the tyranny of the king, because he might interfere with their "freedom" to oppress the serfs.

You haven't lived until you've had to sit and listen to men define words for you during conversations.

Ouch. Things haven’t changed that much from Jane Austen's era. (Did you see that piece on mansplaining where the author had a man lecture her about her own book?!?)

One thing that really irks me is when I think I'm having a conversation, and it turns out the other person wants it to be a lecture… especially when it's from a position of comparative ignorance. Sometimes the problem is that the lecturer is essentially refighting some contention with another person… (But gender issues add a whole other dynamic. Maddow gets that crap all the time, too.) If it's a discussion, a conversation, it's not about "winning" or posturing… I would like to think that I've rarely been guilty of that crap. Geekdom should be pure, friendly and inclusive!